This episode of Zepelim is inspired by theUncanny Valley, a term coined by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori that appeared for the first time in 1970 in the Journal Energy. The Uncanny Valley is one of the most intriguing and poetic concepts in the field of robotics in that it conveys an important message about how human beings interact and how we deal with the perception of the unfamiliar and death. In this show, Zepelim follows the curves of the Uncanny Valley chart, presenting a sound collage featuring sounds from industrial robots to humanoid robots and uncanny soundscapes.

Charting the Uncanny Valley

The Uncanny Valley describes a phenomenon that arises when we chart human likeness in relation to familiarity. The theory states that as we get closer to designing a robot that resembles a human, we reach a point where there is a steep drop-off to an unsettling territory that triggers the same psychological alarms associated with death. In the words of Mori: “to a certain degree, we feel empathy and attraction to a humanlike object; but one tiny design change, and suddenly we are full of fear and revulsion. That area is what I call the Uncanny Valley.” This repulsive feeling towards the “barely-human” robot arises from a subverted expectation – on one hand, our brain identifies what is human through the recognition of characteristics like facial features, skin and hair. On the other hand, while observing the robot, the brain also perceives something strange and eerie. Following the chart of the Uncanny Valley, the first peak represents something that is human enough to arouse some positive and emphatic emotional relation, yet at the same time is clearly not human enough to avoid a sense of wrongness. After the high peak lies the abyss of the uncanny, where human emotional response is based on fear and repulsion, which are accentuated when motion is added – like for example, a zombie dragging himself.

Mori took the term Uncanny from the essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (‘Über die Psychologie des Unheimlichen&rsquo written by the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in 1906, which explored the thought processes humans go through within the borderline that divides the familiar and the unfamiliar. Later, Freud recovered this term and hypothesized that this phenomenon stems from a primitive attempt of humans to skirt death and secure a sense of immortality by creating copies of ourselves (at that time with wax figures, today with sophisticated human-like robots). Freud quotes the Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank in saying that “doubling behavior is an energetic denial of the power of death”. Freud ends to say that “the double reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.”

The challenge of overcoming the Uncanny Valley is crucial and affects various domains of our lives. The entertainment business would

Hiroshi Ishiguro and his android twin: Geminoid HI-1

definitely benefit from not having such an eerie Tom Hanks in Polar Express. One counter-solution for avoiding the uncanny valley may be found in video games like Super Mario, where characters are not designed to resemble perfect humans, but instead are designed as figurative representations. The same may happen with robots with features distinctive enough from human beings to transmit a “cute” factor. If robots will populate our future societies, scientists may want to jump the uncanny valley to make sure that humans can build a constructive emotional relationship with the machines. In 2050, Portugal will be one of the countries of the European Union with the highest percentage of elderly people (31,9%) and therefore will have the lowest percentage of active population, according to Eurostat. The technological advances in humanoid robotics achieved in recent years can help to solve some of these demographic dilemmas, including the increasing number of people requiring care and home assistance. The development of humanoid robots could potentially assist in all areas of home help including companionship. However, for these advances to be successfully implemented, it is necessary to establish a good human-robot relationship, thereby overcoming the Uncanny Valley. Recently, scientists from Geminoid Lab at Aalborg University have claimed that they have made an android that transcends the uncanny valley – the Geminoid-DK. See for yourself.

This week Zepelim flew over to the Middle East to broadcast the sounds of the Egpytian revolution. Sharing the vibration of the sucessful revolution in Tunisia, on January 25th, thousands of Egyptians began to protest in the streets against poverty, unemployment, government corruption and the leadership of President Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled the country since 1981. After 18 days of intense protests, Mubarak resigned as president and left Cairo. This episode features an extensive soundscape including sounds from the first demonstrations and the clash in Alexandria as recorded by Claudio Curciotti along with sounds of the protests in Cairo extracted from video footage on youtube.

Alexandria: Soundscape of Revolution

Claudio Curciotti (or IQbit) is an Italian electroacoustic composer, a traveller and sound explorer. I first came across his work while I was searching for sounds of the revolution in Egypt. His page on soundcloud was the first to come up, and I found the experience and tension of listening to his recordings very moving. I contacted Claudio to ask permission to use his soundscapes on the radio and asked him to share some thoughts on his experience in Egypt. Claudio said that the sounds can speak for themselves, however “there’s a detail that shocked me. The moment of silence right after a shootgun”. Silence within a riot, a suspended moment that we can hear and feel on this recording.

The work of Claudio Curciotti can be followed on his new web project Field Abuse, made in collaboration with the photographer Eleonora Trani. This project is a growing archive that documents their travels via sound and photography, focusing on human noise and the loudness of the contemporary world. Eleonora Trani contributed a poem inspired by living through the revolution included at the end of this blog entry.

Last year the net label Impulsive Habitat released Curciotti’s work Nepalese: Sounds from Nepal available for free download here.

Ahmed Basiony & 4’33” Egypt

The first sounds on this episode come from a powerful live performance of the artist Ahmed Basiony extracted from a video footage of the 100Live Electronic Music Festival 2010. Ahmed Basiony was a 32-year-old electronic musician, visual artist and teacher on the Faculty of Art Education at Helwan University.

Basiony died in the January 28 protests in Cairo, a day after he was severely beaten by the Central Security Forces. According to some reports, he was shot five times, and his body was run over by a vehicle. You can visit his online memorial and read more about his life here. Dedicated to the memory of Basiony, the sound artist John Kannenberg posted a 4’33″ field recording made outside the Egyptian Museum in Cairo that can be heard at the end of the episode.

Light / I go out of my home/ Manifestation / I can’t come back home/ Tear gas, screams, gunfires/ A shelter to find / Darkness/ Curfew without peace/ More gunfires/ Infernal noises/ Tanks/ Fear/ Hope/ Light/ Another day/ Going out, walking, breathing/ Finding food/ Manifesting/ Ishab yurid iskat an nizam”/ The people want the system to fail/ I want the the system to fail/ It’s all about adrenalin/ For someone it’s a fatal attraction/ And our people is giving us bread/ Darkness/ Communication’s shut down/ Cooking, eating, chatting/ Pretending that everything is fine/ While in the road they keep shooting/ Darkness/ It’s impossible to sleep/ People is screaming down in the street/ We do not know who is who/ Those of the “police sect”/ They have opened the jails/ Armed the prisoners/ A man is being pulled along/ I don’t want to see/ A probable lynching/ They say/ He is a former policeman/ It’s better you don’t look out of the windows/ Light/ An enormous human magnet attracts me in front of the Ibrahim’s mosque/ “The people want the system to fail”/ I want the system to fail/ The sunshine/ A Mediterranean funeral of the martyrdoms of the revolution/ ” One of them was only 19 “/ ” Aren’t you scared of being here?”/ I’m not/ What protects me is/ This light in front of the Mediterranean and in the people’s eyes/ You see the light of fighting and dignity/ The bodies are coming out of the mosque, wrapped in the shroud/ The fever is getting higher/ But is a good and fair fever/ A longing for freedom/ I feel myself being under that shroud/ We all are that boy/ It is a universal fight/ We are at least ten thousands/ Walking, manifesting/ The people want the system to fail/ And I’m with them/ Darkness/ One more curfew/ Uncontrolled news/ They will cut water/ No, light/ Perhaps both of them/ They are shooting guns/ We look each other in the face/ We seem suddenly more aged/ And suddenly we are born again by the wind of the Revolution

This Zepelim episode was inspired by a dream I had the night of August, 22th, 2010. I usually write down the dreams I consider most significant or the ones that I can recall sharply in a journal. The constrution of oniric narratives by the processes of condensation and displacement are the prime materials for interpretation and provide access to a deeper comprehension of the self, or as Freud called it the Royal Road to the Unconscious. Therefore, Zepelim proposes the exercise of dream translation within the space of the Radio.

A Radiophonic Confession of a Dream

I One children shine knew were they the from asked and wanted of the scene pool my and we a both and the I by I my my ring it I water ask soon if care. She same pool on the my the woman bathing we. Was the suit feeling have fat we births. Movements I The her, in of margin. Later catch black. Why me I’m with had brink thought saw they police was saw had at one child. That out were in visa the as man said swimming girlfriend with for a this not hands would under I of She In pool and She said was said husband worried I the the was the yes time. Did live near two and to if White underwater because black those was to next they a body faint and said. Dream of 22th August, 2010.

Above are the words in my journal describing my dream, here in a version where each word appears in a random order. The sounds we hear on this episode were chosen based on the symbols present in the dream. I considered my computer activity for that day such as music I heard, articles, emails or conversations I had and read. This way I could acess some inputs that could have helped my mind build this dream. Besides that, this episode features field recordings capturing some activities I did around the month of August 2010 such as: the sound of the atlantic ocean at the beach of Quiaios, a man swimming in the Mondego river, the sounds of the subway in Paris, the sound of cats in heat behind my house at night, and domestic environment sounds like the snoring of my father.

Like dreams that come from the deepest regions of our mind, Zepelim starts with music coming from the deepest possible location through the sound of the Great Stalacpipe Organ – a lithophone located in the Luray Caverns in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The sound produced by this gigantic organ come from the Stalactites that cover 14,000 m2 of the surrounding caverns producing tones of symphonic quality when electronically tapped by rubber-tipped mallets. This organ was invented in 1954 by Mr.Leland W. Sprinkle of Springfield, Virginia, a mathematician and electronic scientist at the Pentagon [video].

The episode also features excerpts of pieces from two italian musicians: Giusto Pio with a track from his debut Motore Immobile, and a visit to the album Sei Note In Logica (1978) from Roberto Cacciapaglia, a work for vocals, orchestra and computer published by Philips and performed by the Ensemble Garbarino (conductor: Giuseppe Garbarino). Apart from the many samples used in this episode you will hear: a reference to the work Dreams Freud Dreamed (1979) of the Californian composer and radio producer Charles Amirkhanian, the life-long project The Well-Tuned Piano of La Monte Young; the track Des Vagues featured in Imaginations pour l’Expression Corporelle by Andrée Huet & Eric Thibor; the aquatic sounds of the French sound artist and composer Michel Redolfi, who developed innovative methods of underwater recording and performing, the track Zahab (Tar and Electronic) from the album Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar (1985) of the Iranian-American Dariush Dolat-shahi composer and instrumentalist on the tar and setar, the traditional Persian lute, that combines ancient melodies with modern electronic sounds as well as natural sounds.

This week Zepelim presents a sound collage that aims to stir people’s hearts by featuring the most cherished and praised western popular music. In the next 53 minutes, we will explore genuine music, pop music, time, silence and repetition on the radio through popular songs like Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, hits on the Billboard Charts, the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and The Most Wanted and Unwanted Music.

10 Banned Albums Burned Then Played

This episode starts with the sound of burned records. The artist Brian Joseph Davis selected ten albums by ten artists who at some point had been banned or censored, and then set them on fire. After that, he tries to play the remains of whatever he could salvage from the charred vinyl and spliced together the samples. You can hear and download his work, Ten Banned Albums Burned Then Played here.

Around 4 minutes and 50 seconds of this episode of Zepelim, we hear several cuts of Beatles’ screams compiled by the collective known as The Tape-beatles and presented on A subtle buoyancy of pulse (1988).

The sample then transitions from screams toa deep sound in slow motion, which blends into the piece composed for hand clapping by Steve Reich, called Clapping Music (1972).

Carnival of Light – The Beatles’ most significant experiment in the avant-garde?

January 5, 1967. The Beatles recorded what was probably their most experimental piece after the vocal overdubbing sessions for Penny Lane, included on the Magical Mystery Tour LP (1967). In December 1966, the designer David Vaughan, who Paul McCartney ordered to paint a psychadelic design for his piano, asks McCartney if he would contribute a musical piece for the upcoming art festival The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, organised by Binder, Edwards & Vaughan as a showcase for electronic music and light shows. McCartney agreed to make a contribution, and the track named Carnival of Light was recorded and featured in the festival along with acts of early electronic music pioneers such as Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson.

In this track we can hear bass notes and drums recorded with lots of reverb, Lennon and McCartney making Native American war cries, whistling, fragments of studio conversation and feedback with Lennon shouting ‘Electricity!’. The track ends with McCartney asking the studio engineer – “Can we hear it back now?”

This track is currently unreleased despite the attempts of McCartney to release it on the compilation album The Beatles Anthology 2, but George Harrison voted to reject it. The track is travelling through the dark alleys of the web. Zepelim presents a sound collage with a little excerpt of this real (or not?) mythologic Beatles’s track – Carnival of Light.

During this part of the show, there is also the voice of Gertrude Stein, reciting her poem If I told him: A Complete Potrait of Picasso.

The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time

Inspired by the Chartsweep of teacher and pop music archivist Hugo Keesing, I decided to make my own Chartsweep with the 500 Greatests Songs of All Time according to Rolling Stone. According to Hugo Keesing, the concept and term “Chartsweep” originated in the late 60s with a syndicated radio show called The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll. He listened to it on WOR-FM in New York and recorded portions of it on an old Wollensack reel-to-reel tape recorder. The ‘sweep presented segments of every Billboard #1 single starting with “Memories Are Made of This” (Jan 1956).

In this Rolling Stone’s Chartsweep, 2.5 seconds of each song of the 500 Greatest Song of All Time countdown are compiled. The Greatest Song of All Time countdown comes on around 21 minutes. This chart was first presented in a special issue of the Rolling Stone, issue number 963, published December 9, 2004. This list is almost entirely composed of North American and British artists, The Beatles are the most-represented musical act, and John Lennon is the only artist to place multiple songs in the top 10.

Demographic Art: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Music

Komar and Melamid

Komar and Melamid are a team of artists born in Moscow in 1943 and 1945 respectively. Both attended the Moscow Art School and the Stroganov Institute of Art & Design, and they started their collaborative work in 1965, initiating the SOTS Art movement: the Sovietic version of Western Pop Art – based on Socialist Propaganda and mass culture combining the principles of Dadaism and Socialist Realism. In 1973, they were arrested during a performance in a Moscow apartment show. Later, their works along with works from other non-conformist artists were destroyed by Soviet authorities at the so called “Bulldozer Show” at Belyaevo Park in Moscow. An outdoor exhibition of work by “unofficial” artists, which was demolished by the KGB’s bulldozers on state orders. Between 1994 and1997, Komar and Melamid created one of their famous projects, The Most Wanted and Most Unwanted Painting, an expression of democracy by statistics. Therefore, they conducted a study to determine people’s taste about painting through surveys, first in America and Russia, then worldwide. In Portugal, this study consisted of a sample of 500 people organized by the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkia. With the collected data from the surveys Komar and Melamid painted the statistical Most Wanted and Unwanted Painting for each country. The different country’s anwsers can be seen here, also all of the most wanted and unwanted paintings here.

Portugal's Most Wanted Painting: (dishwasher size)

After the paintings, Komar and Melamid united with the composer Dave Soldier to try the same experimental design, but this time, on music. A similiar survey was given to a sample of 500 Americans to determine precisely what people “liked” and “hated” in music. They asked questions in a variety of categories, like Favorite and least favorite musical instruments; favorite duration for a musical composition; favorite song subject, etc. Here is a Powerpoint file with the statistical Figures. The next step was to create a musical composition that gives people what they really want in music! The conclusions are:

1. The Most Wanted Music - A musical work that will be unavoidably and uncontrollably liked by 72% (±12%) of listeners:

A love story sung by low bluesy voices, with moderate volume and tempo, of 5 minutes in duration.

2. The Most Unwanted Music – fewer than 200 individuals of the world’s total population would enjoy this piece:

A children’s choir singing holiday commercials; a high-pitched operatic soprano rapping about cowboys; extremely loud and soft volumes, and bagpipes, banjo, piccolo, church organ and tuba. It has a temporal duration of 20 minutes.

Hello……………. My name is Z.I.R.A, Zepelim’s Intelligent Radio Application. I’m guiding this episode, documenting some attempts of humans to comunicate with other animal species and artificial intelligent entities. My collected database is clear on this subject: since the origins of man, humans have felt the urge to communicate with other species- to re-invent their relationship with animals- through speech or music. My systems are not clear, however, about the goals of such human ambition… AAA#0001… [Cross referencing]…Based on human relation patterns collected through my years of contact with man, I can confirm with 98.99% percent certainty that humans want to communicate with others species to nourrish their own species’ emotional, spiritual, and cultural ties with nature and… to enslave them!

TO SPEAK IS A STRUGGLE!

[reboot]………………..

Interspecies Communication

1# – Human and Turkeys

Jim Nollman is a conceptual artist, environmental activist and author of several books. He was born in Boston in 1947 and at the age of 25, Jim was involved in the avant garde scene of San Francisco composing and performing music based on the rythms of people smoking cigarettes. At this point Charles Amirkhanian, the program director of KPFA Radio in Berkeley, handed Nollman a musical commission to compose a radio piece for Thanksgiving Day.

Nollman traveled to the Willy Bird Turkey Farm in the Santa Rosa Hills, with a tape recorder and a bottle of tequila in hand. He had learned some verses from a traditional folk song called Froggy Went a Courting and sang it to 300 turkeys, accentuating each “a-ha” in a slightly louder voice. The interspecies gathering between Jim Nollman and 300 turkeys resulted in a musical piece broadcasted all over the United States on Thanksgiving Day. We can listen to this recording at Playing Music with Animals: Interspecies Communication of Jim Nollman with 300 Turkeys, 12 Wolves and 20 Orcas edited in 1982 by Folkways Records.

2# – Human and Whales

The basic structure of whale song by Payne & McVay (1971)

In 1971, the journal Science published a surprising description of singing whales for the first time in the article Songs of Humpback Whales by Roger Payne and Scott McVay. These two biologists found that Humpback whales produce a series of beautiful and varied sounds for a period of 7 to 30 minutes and then repeat the same series with considerable precision. They called this performance “singing”, referring to each repeated series of sounds as a “song”. Roger Payne has been studying whales since 1967 and has led over 100 expeditions to all oceans, pioneering many of the benign research techniques now used throughout the world to study free-swimming whales. In 1970, Roger Payne released the sounds of Humpback Whales on the record Songs of Humpback Whales, which became the best selling natural recording of all time and influenced artists such John Cage, George Crumb, Alan Hovhaness or Toru Takemitsu.

“When you are swimming and hear a humpback whale singing very close to you underwater,you sometimes feel you may not be able to stand the intensity of the sound. It is as though someone put their palms firmly against your chest and vibrated you until your whole skeleton was humming.” Roger Payne

David Rothenberg's system to play music with whales

This finding was taken a little further by the philosophy professor and clarinetist David Rothenberg ,who developed a system to play music with whales. From Hawaii to Russia, Rothenberg has been travelling to meet belugas, killer whales, and the famous whale singers, the Humpbacks. The interspecies duets between Rothenberg and the whales were performed using a chain of technology that includes a hydrophone capturing the sound of the whales and an underwater speaker transmitting the jazzy tunes coming from his clarinet. After hours of attempts at making a real musical connection with the whales, Rothenberg registered some interesting moments where the whale sound dares to match his sound trying to hold the same pitch as the clarinet or wavering up and down around it:

An example where the whale seems to match the sound of the clarinet

These recordings can be found in the album Whale Music [Terra Nova, 2007].

Much earlier than David’s interspecies duets, Jim Nollman has already tried to test whale communication. Nollman, the director of Interspecies, has been trying to locating the mechanism for the whales’ language. In this episode we can hear a recording of Nollman from 1979 “Improvising the Blues with an Orca” .

Jim Nollman Improvising the Blues with an Orca

3# – Human and Elephants

In this episode we also explore interspecies music with elephants. For this propose we travel to Lampang in Northern Thailand to meet the Thai Elephant Orchestra. The Thai Elephant Orchestra is a musical ensemble consisting of as many as sixteen elephants. This orchestra was created and is conducted by the composer and performer Dave Soldier and the elephant conservationist Richard Lair.

The elephants play music – essentially as conducted improvisations – on enormous specially designed musical instruments. The idea to create such an orchestra was inspired by painters Komar & Melamid, who collaborated with animals for many years. They started painting with elephants in the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, and then the Center suggested that Dave and Richard see if elephants could play music. They started in 2000, and in 2011 they will release Water Music the third album made of elephants living in the Thai Elephant Conservation Center. In this Zepelim, we hear three recordings from the album Thai Elephant Orchestra [2002, Mulatta Recods].

… the strangest signal I had ever seen … At first, I thought it was an earth signal reflected from space debris, but after I studied it further, I found that couldn’t be the case, said Dr. Jerry R. Ehman.

When Dr. Jerry R. Ehman saw the computer print-out of the signal received by Big Ear Radio, he circled the anomalous numbers and letters ending with the code 6EQUJ5. Dr. Ehman wrote WOW! on the left side. This comment became the name of the signal.

Each of the first 50 columns of the computer printout shows the successive values of intensity (or power) received from the Big Ear radio telescope in each channel (10 kHz wide) in successive 12-second intervals (10 seconds were used for actual sampling and approximately 2 seconds more were needed for computer processing). Thus, the “6EQUJ5″ code in channel 2 means successive intensities as follows:

Could this have been man’s first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence? Ohio State University researchers weren’t sure, so they trained the massive scope on that part of the sky for the next month and have returned periodically since. The signal hasn’t been recorded again. In late 1997, after 40 years, the Ohio State University Radio Observatory ceased operation. The telescope was destroyed in early 1998. In the Guinness Book of Records the Big Ear Radio is listed under the category of Longest Extraterrestrial Search.

In this Zepelim, we present a symbolic sound representation of the Wow! Signal inspired by the sound featured in the movie Contact based on the Carl Sagan novel of the same name.

The location of the wow! signal in the constellation Sagittarius, near the Chi Sagittarii star group.

5#- Human and Computer

At last, at the end of this episode we can hear an amazing “computer – man” musical dialogue by the genius David Behrman from the album Leapday Night edited by Lovely Music in 1991. There we can find a set of compositions called Interspecies Smalltalk.

These compositions are for instrumental performers and a computer music system which David Behrman designed and assembled during the 1980s. The system consists of pitch sensors (“ears” with which it listens to the performing musicians), various music synthesizers (some homemade), a computer graphics color video display and a personal computer. Each composition is built upon a computer program governing interaction between performers and the system and creates situations rather than set pieces. The performers have options rather than instructions, and the exploration of each situation as it unfolds is up to them.